At the First Things sort-of-blog Jason Byassee reviews what sounds like a fascinating book from Methodist ethicist Amy Laura Hall called Conceiving Parenthood: American Protestantism and the Spirit of Reproduction which, in Byassee’s words “aims to show that the powerful narrative of ‘progress’ in twentieth-century American Protestantism is linked indelibly with eugenics, abortion, Hiroshima, racism, sexism, psychotropic drugs for kids, and the triumph of a neoliberal economics that grinds the heads of the poor….”

The debate about genetic manipulation, selective abortion and other kinds of bio-engineering have taken something of a back seat in recent years to what have seemed like more pressing issues, but this is going to be with us for a long time as technology continues to raise new questions. Byassee wonders – with good reason I think – whether the mainline churches in particular have the theological spine left to look critically at the presumption in favor of “progress” and our desire to exercise ever greater control over natural processes.